The proliferation of the Internet has facilitated the sharing and distribution of content and data like never before. Users now flock to websites, search engines, and social networks to access and share content and data. The amount of data available is estimated to be on the order of millions of terabytes. Along with this data comes an unprecedented opportunity to explore it for business purposes as well as a responsibility and need to respect the privacy of users.
User data may be explored and analyzed for marketing purposes (e.g., targeted advertising), tagging services (e.g., visual tagging), location-based services (e.g., location-based recommendations), and business forecasting (e.g., budget forecasting), among others. The user data may be collected and analyzed by a number of data aggregation, data mining and analytics tools. These tools may be embedded directly into the web sites, search engines, and social networks where the users are sharing their data.
A common theme among these data aggregation, data mining and analytics tools is that user data may be collected and traded by multiple business parties at a profit without the knowledge, consent, and proper compensation of the users.